October 2020
Century Farms
PAGE 5
Cheryl Sutter’s life as on the farm has come full circle By JON WEISBROD jon.weisbrod@apgsomn.com
and satisfied with their life. They shared a strong bond forged through similar upbringings in a quintessenBLOOMING GROVE TWP. — You tially rural community in the 1950s can take Cheryl Forrest out of the and 1960s. farm, but you can’t take the farm out As the couple neared retirement, they of Cheryl Forrest. began searching for land near Lakeville to perhaps start a hobby farm to It just wasn’t going to happen. help satisfy Cheryl’s innate agriculAfter graduating from Gustavus tural instincts that had been fortified Adolphus College in 1969, Forrest through 18 years of growing up on soon got married, raised a family, the farm. The notion of returning to watched her children start their own the sprawling acreage of her homefamilies and was proud of how she stead just north of Waseca had longwas able to influence generations of since been buried as Cheryl searched students as an English teacher for for a much-smaller plot to indulge four decades, first at Hopkins High her interests as a master gardener, School for a couple years and then horse enthusiast and general lover of Henry Sibley for the next 38. She and all animals found roaming the barns her husband, Dan, had purchased a she once called home. home on the outskirts of Burnsville shortly after they got married in June Perhaps unsurprisingly, nothing 1970 and where comfortable, happy stuck. She kept “looking and look-
ing and looking” and no matter the of fell into place for both sides. size, the price or the location, she just Cheryl and Dan proposed that couldn’t pull the trigger. Meghan and Yuuki move into their “I guess I just thought I’d be looking Burnsville home so they could move forever,” she admitted. south to Waseca and return to the farm, at least temporarily. Years of fruitless searching, though, was all about to come to an end when It’s been six years and they haven’t Cheryl and Dan came to a crossroads left. that just-so happened to intersect with a pivotal time in their daughter’s “A farm was always in the back of my mind, but I’m not sure about my huslife. band,” Cheryl said with a smile on a The year was 2014 and Cheryl’s Wednesday fall morning. “As far as 176-acre farmstead had been laying coming back here — back home? No, dormant for the previous four years I didn’t think about that. But I said following the death of her stepfather, if we want a chance to move to the Raymond. Cheryl and Dan were farm, this is it, and we did that. At the recently retired — and after discov- time, my husband said: ‘This is going ering that their daughter, Meghan to be temporary,’ but I guess it turned Forrest, and their son-in-law, Yuuki into permanent.” Metreaud, were suddenly in the market for a new home — things just sort Every family has a story
Cheryl (Lee) Sutter spent most of the first 18 years of her life on her family’s farm in Blooming Grove Township in northeast Waseca County. (Jon Weisbrod/southernminn.com)
The Sutter-Lee farm traces its roots through Cheryl’s side of the family and dates back more than 150 years to 1861 when Cheryl’s great-grandfather, Alec K. Lee, immigrated to the United States with his father, Knudt Lee, from a “little town” in southern Norway called Vinje. The family first settled in Wisconsin before ultimately making their way to southern Minnesota and establishing a Lutheran church with a number of other immigrants from their tiny Scandinavian hamlet that sits roughly 100 miles west of present-day Oslo. Alec and his wife, Betty, built their first home in 1888 on an 80-acre plot that has since more doubled in size over the last 130-plus years and blossomed into a six-building compound fitted with everything from a large refurbished traditional bright red barn,
to a contemporary gazebo, to a white chicken coop.
“They say the first (home) was a sod house, although that’s just the story,” Cheryl said. “Everyone around here had log cabins. They built it right on the end of the big woods (and) sat just to the north. The stones are still in the ground.”
Alec and Betty raised most of their 11 children in what Cheryl called a loftstyle cabin before in 1913 building the home that stands on the property to this day. Cheryl’s grandfather, Knute, was the second-youngest of the bunch and would one day take the reins of the family operation that included a wide variety of livestock and crops at its peak.
Sutter Continued on page 14
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